I just have to share this.....

This last week I received an urgent email from some friends in VA.

One of their classroom family has autism, and they love "C" very much!!!!

Sadly, some of the other kids at school have been making fun of C. This has made his

friends and teacher very sad. As a class they were trying to come up with some ways 

that they could get the others to be nice. They decided to email me and see if I could draw up a "big head" (how cute is that???) of C, so that the others would accept him better.

I am so humbled by such trust!!!!!! To think that my little friends in room 201 

believe that I could do something of such great importance, really touched me. I think I felt a little

bit of what a teacher must feel every day! It still makes me teary :)

This morning, my friends got to see the "big head C", and they sent me back an email about it. They gave me permission to share it.

Ms. Nikki,

We cannot believe how much your art looks like C!!! It made him SO happy. He has carried it around all morning. He showed Mrs. Morse, the librarian, and Mrs. "Snowball" (her real name is Stovall but he calls her Snowball so we do, too!), and Mrs. Rakes, and Miss Martin, and Mrs. Napier, and Mrs. Boaz, and everyone who works in the office, and he is going to show it to Mrs. Dr. Rodgers, our principal. We think it is so cool.

We all REALLY LOVE C but sometimes people don't get him and they make fun of him. They were making fun of him in the cafeteria for wearing headphones but it isn't his fault that he hears too much. We learned this year that it isn't easy to have autism, but C is part of our classroom family and we love him.

We know our teacher worries all the time about next year and us looking out for him, but we know that with friends like you and us, we don't have anything to worry about. Thanks for loving him as much as we do, and our teacher says we can pick out MORE BIG heads today! We cannot even believe how lucky we are to get MORE BIG HEADS! Do you know that it CRACKS US UP that they don't have noses? We make sure to point that out every time. Oh, and we have a big poster about "never saying never" that Justin Bieber (we all love him but our teacher loves him most) and she says YOU MADE THAT TOO! YOU ARE SO COOL!

We will email you later when we pick out our big heads. Also, we wanted you to know that our teacher showed us the picture you made of the little kids holding Oklahoma...we love it! We are really scared of tornadoes, but we actually don't get them where we are in VA...we are surrounded by mountains that protects us like a donut hole. We all are wondering if you are protected by mountains like a donut hole, too? And we also wanted to tell you we watched a video this morning of a lady who found her dog in her house after the tornado. It made our teacher cry and cry but she said it was because she was happy and to remember that good things can come out of really bad things. One of us (me, Malaki) said that YOU, Ms. Nikki, remind of us of the dog coming out of the tornado mess...because it was so bad C got made fun of, but you made us the most perfect picture of C, and YOU were a little big of good coming from a mess. That made our teacher cry even harder when I made that connection...she's so silly with her crying!

So, thank you. We love, love, love your art and it makes a difference every day. We have been sitting on the carpet telling our teacher exactly what to put in this email, and she is typing really quickly to catch up. She thinks you should put it on your blog (we don't really get that) so everyone can know how amazing you are.

Thanks for fulling our bucket and we can't wait to let you know what big heads we pick out!

Love, love, LOVE, LOVE,

Room 201

Bassett, VA

sniff sniff..... I think I need a bigger bucket myself.

Thank you room 201, for giving my life a greater purpose this week!

Love and hugs!!!

xox